Blindman's Bluff

Fun With Culture

This is a story about an actual restaurant, here in Zurich, which serves meals in total darkness. We're talking pitch black, can't see your hand in front of your face as much as you try. It's a bit eerie and you THINK your eyes will adjust throughout the meal, but they don't. You are blind. I’ve read several different accounts on how the idea came about for this dining experience, but all point to the same thing…Reverend Jorge Spielmann, blind himself, wanted to give sighted people the opportunity to experience the world of the blind.

If you walk out of our apartment building and take a right, you’ll find the “Blind Cow” one block down on the right. Apparently this is a world renowned restaurant, though I had never heard of it before. Blindkuh is the name in German and it comes from the Swiss equivalent of the children's game “Blind Man’s Bluff."

Views from outside and inside the restaurant.

Two months ago, the six of us (seven now) sitting in our little office in Zurich, decided that we wanted to try this out, so we booked a reservation for June 21st. When we arrived, we entered a well-lit lobby with the menu projected on one wall. We were instructed to remove all watches, phones and purses (they had lockers for these). There is no place on the floor for a purse and who knows how big the table is. Taking a mental note of what we wanted to eat, we were then greeted by a waitress. We were lucky to have 3 German-speakers among our group, as very little English was spoken by the staff. She guided us into this dimly lit hallway, where we were told to grab onto one another’s shoulders and make a train. When we walked through those heavy drapes and hit the darkness, my stomach dropped…immediate loss of appetite. It was a strange, unsettling feeling, mostly because I just didn’t realize how dark it would be. The hunger came back after just a few minutes and I rather enjoyed the experience of listening to people (even though I couldn’t understand the German). I’ve heard that this place is pretty popular for blind dates, where they arrange for you to arrive and be seated at separate times. You don’t see each other until after you’ve had a meal in the dark, and even then you don’t have to see each other. You can run far, far away before the other one can catch up.

She sat us down one by one and told us where our glass was, took our orders, brought us drinks, told us where the refill water bottle was with respect to our glass, brought our food, and at that point one girl from our group couldn’t take it anymore and had to leave. The Swiss guy in our group called out the waitress’ name a good three times and she finally came over to help our colleague out into the light. We found out later that this girl ate her food at a little kids’ table in the lobby and that the food looked like it tasted – pretty good, not great.

During the meal there were a lot of threats and promises spewing from our table:

“Next time I’m gonna bring Tabasco Sauce and put it in people’s drinks”
“You can’t see me so I’m going to steal your food”
“I don’t want to get anything on my shirt so I’m just going to take it off”

Also, some money on the table for dares:

“I’ll give you 20 Francs to get up and run toward the exit. Ha. Ha. Ha.”
And then just ridiculous laughter about where the exit would actually be. (In the lobby they have a floor plan and you can figure out afterwards where you were sitting).

Another memorable comment was, “what if there was a fire, how could we see where the exit is?”

There was also a lot of eating with the hands and they were nice enough to give us washrags after we were through.

It would be really hilarious to see the infrared video of this meal.

You can listen to NPR's experience here.